It is roughly the size and shape of the Droid and iPhone, and bigger than the Pre. But will it succeed? No.

It has no hardware keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard is not very good.

It has a bad music player (I love my Pre for that, syncs with iTunes as a iPod)

It is marginally faster than a Droid, but not noticeably faster than the 3gs or Pre (which both have faster processors than the Droid - but not as fast as the Nexus One)

It has a limit of 512mb for apps (same as droid - unlimited on Pre, well 7gb, and iPhone)

The AMOLED screen contrast is too high while at the same time leads to the phone being impossible to see in direct sunlight.

It has no multitouch. This is a big fail. Sorry to droid users, but there really is something nice, simple and quick about multitouch. Granted, Apple has a lot of patents, but come on. (The consensus logic, and what Palm came out and said, is that they have a whole ton of patents also - they were after all the first maker of PDA's and an original leader in smartphones, so its sort of a standoff with them and Apple)

It ain't pretty. The 90's called and they want their generic electronic looks back. (granted, some like it, I call it forgettable and dated)

Amusingly, the "big update" of Android for the Nexus One turns out to be making the home page more Pre-like. I personally find the apps on Android to be good, but the OS to be much less well laid out than webOS of the Pre.

And finally: T-Mobile. Google will sell the phone "direct to customers" - for $520. Or you can get it subsidized (like 99% of people will) for $179 with a 2yr T-Mobile contract. Let me say that again: T-Mobile. People think Sprint is a little odd. T-Mobile is the forgotten player in cell networks, and for good reason: its just too small.

The Google phone has one big selling point: Google. Of course, you could say "Apple" is all the iPhone has right now, and you would be correct. But it got to where it is now by being the first, and by being completely revolutionary. The Nexus one is neither of these things. Depending on your perspective it is better or worse than the Droid/iPhone/Pre and certainly does not blow them away.